The contretemps du jour on Twitter is an attempt by TERFs to take over a trans-inclusive bar in Edinburgh (Meb is the bartender who politely threw them out). Marion Millar, a notorious transphobe who is currently awaiting trial for hate crimes against trans people, was one of the organizers who “innocently” (yeah, if you believe that you’re pretty darned gullible) booked a night out with the girls at Doctors, a pub in Edinburgh.

That would be fine, even TERFs get to enjoy some fish & chips and a pint now and then, except…they saw this as an opportunity to hand out inflammatory flyers and put up gender critical stickers in the rest room and argue with the other patrons and the bartender.

Here’s a good summary of the evening.

Doctors bar in Edinburgh and specifically their manager have come under fire from a torrent of abuse from transphobes on social media who have even been review-bombing the bar on Facebook etc. This after a group of transphobes went to the bar wearing transphobic campaigning t-shirts and armed with leaflets which they attempted to litter around the place. They were politely asked to leave, refused and were escorted out by police.

They got what they wanted, to provoke and disturb other people and get in the news with their brand of indignant hatred, and the staff at the bar dealt with it as responsibly as they could. They also found a target for their hate to focus on, Meb, and an exciting new hashtag they can poison.

If ever I find myself in Edinburgh again, I’ll definitely seek out Doctors and give them my custom. They sound like good people.

So, Aubrey de Grey was accused of sexual harassment, and was under a formal investigation. I guess he wasn’t confident about the outcome, because he tried to apply some pressure to potential witnesses, and got caught.

A “necessary” firing by people who are clearly deep admirers of the guy is an interesting combination. It suggests de Grey has been frantic in his efforts to scuttle the investigation to the point his dismissal was completely unavoidable.

I do wonder where he could go after this. I can’t imagine a university would want to be affiliated with him, but maybe some oddball think-tank somewhere would take him on. Or some quack organization — Mercola has money, he could use a celebrity front to help sell anti-aging snake oil.

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Uh-oh. This is just going to get weirder. De Grey just posted his response on Facebook, and it’s wild.

with the investigation. Below is the entire text. Decide for yourself. Remember that my mention of the state of Celine’s career “as things stand” was written in the aftermath of the outpouring of support for me and condemnation of her that followed my first Facebook post 24 hours previously.
Let me close by saying that I am in a perfectly fine position to start a new foundation right now, hiring my loyal staff and proceeding as if nothing had happened, but that that is not my plan. I plan to get the truth known, my foundation back, and the bad actors excised from our community. Meanwhile, let’s just keep going.
Text of the email that precipitated today’s action:
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Rght mate, if you care about your (and my, yes) friend Celine you will listen up. There is a job you need to do that probably only you are in a position to do, largely BECAUSE of your rush to judgement today that will have cemented her trust in you.
The six-week investigation into Celine’s allegations against me has concluded. It was conducted by someone named Sue Ann Van Dermyden – look her up – good luck to anyone who tries to paint her as a whitewasher. It has found not only that those allegations are 100% fictitious, but also that Celine’s account of them in her posts and her testimony to Sue Ann is replete with grave inconsistencies – AND, with features that clearly suggest she was fed false information by a SRF board member (which you will probably also have inferred from my Facebook post last night, but then it was just me saying it).
The consequence (other than my reinstatement, obviously) is that a new investigation is being launched, again by Sue Ann, but this time investigating SRF so as to identify the actual villain. The existence of that new investigation is going to be made public tomorrow afternoon – unless, drum roll, it is obviated/aborted by new information.
I probably don’t need to spell out anything more. Celine’s career is absolutely over as things stand, and the only reason it actually isn’t is because I am a man of honour who refuses to let somebody (especially a meteoric rising star) be burned at the stake while an actual villian gets away scot free and is thereby emboldened. Yes she will have to take some lumps for being so gullible, but that’s not such a big deal. BUT, what will completely torpedo my rescuing of her is if she is seen to be resisting the identification of the actual villain. So now, as in tomorrow (Thurs) morning, is the time when Celine needs to find her mojo and spill the beans. As of now, a few people are in the frame as the culprit. Celine needs to name names, and fast, so that no one gets to know that this new investigation is happening as a direct consequence of her insincerity to Sue Ann and the world.
And you need to tell her so, as probably only you can. Go to it.
Cheers A
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“Celine” is Celine Halioua, one of his accusers who has posted a blistering indictment of the man; SRF is the SENS Research Foundation. His defense is…that someone else harassed her? It wasn’t him? He’s just the gallant knight galloping in to rescue her, and her career is over unless she names a different villain. And then he’ll take the SENS Foundation back and purge it of all the bad people who have been conspiring against him. Or start a new foundation of his own. No matter how it turns out, the woman he harassed needs to take a few lumps.

The guy is delusional. I can see why he was fired.

I was going to post this video, but Charly beat me to it. The YouTuber Shaun posted an excellent discussion of the recent gender critical freakout: they tried to claim that Terry Pratchett would have favored their intolerant anti-trans bullshit. Neil Gaiman, Pratchett’s coauthor, responded; Pratchett’s own daughter, Rhianna, was horrified that anyone would abuse his memory in that way. I agree. How anyone could read Pratchett’s work and think he wasn’t completely accepting of trans folk is a mystery, unless it’s just that they never read his books at all.

Shaun (and Charly) recommend his book Monstrous Regiment as far more illustrative of his views — it’s about a regiment of diverse women who all enlisted in the military by pretending to be men. You can’t find a clearer example of a refutation of a phony authorial interpretation. To be honest, I found it to be one of the weaker Discworld books…but it’s often because it gets rather heavy-handed in its dismissal of forced gender roles. It is not at all subtle, which makes it even more ridiculous that GC/TERFs would think Pratchett would take their side.

Aubrey de Grey has been on my crank radar for many years as an amorphous fuzzy electronic blob meandering about in the distance. He’s an immortality “researcher” who makes extravagant claims that newspapers love and promote. For instance, he says that the first person who will live to be 1,000 years old has already been born. Cool. Except that he has no evidence for this, it’s based entirely on unwarranted extrapolation of his exceedingly optimistic view of scientific progress.

For instance, his big idea is that aging is caused by free radical damage by the activity of mitochondria. His solution is to move mitochondrial genes from the organelle to the nucleus, which makes no sense — those reactions are essential to the metabolism of the cell, they have to occur no matter where in the cell that it happens, and we have mitochondria as distributed ‘power plants’ with increased surface area (most of these reactions occur on membranes), so how does centralizing everything limit the deleterious effects of essential energy-producing reactions? The virtue of this scheme seems to be entirely about enhancing his ability to babble sciencey sounding words to venture capitalists like Peter Thiel. I am all for bilking Thiel out of every penny he owns, but the rest of us should be smarter than that.

Furthermore, it’s one thing to make grand promises with technobabble, but has he done anything with the idea? He made a bet over 20 years ago that someone (not him, he wouldn’t know how) would translocate 13 mitochondrial genes to the nucleus, with all the imaginary benefits that would bestow, by 2005. Didn’t happen. Isn’t going to happen. Every cell and molecular biologist is going to look askance at such a silly idea. It’s just more empty, hypothetical promises.

Did you know he was going to cure cancer? This is from an old article in 2005 — I guess he was leaping from his mitochondrial hypothesis, which didn’t pan out, to a new hypothesis about telomeres. The telomere hypothesis has also not panned out; I wonder what new flaky idea he’s telling audiences of rich old people, but unfortunately I don’t care enough to try and find out, although I do know for sure that people are still getting cancer.

…he tells us of his plan to combat cancer, perhaps the most pernicious of the Seven Deadly Sins. The chink in cancer’s armor, de Grey believes, is the telomeres, strands of DNA at the ends of our chromosomes that must be maintained in order for a cell to continue to divide. When scientists started intensively investigating telomeres in the 1990s, the buzz went as follows: If we could turn on the enzyme telomerase, which maintains the telomeres, thereby keeping them, and cell division, going indefinitely, was this not the molecular fountain of youth? It was not. Researchers have since concluded that short, unrepaired telomeres don’t impose an absolute limit on human life. Our bodies have considerable cell reserves, and some of the most crucial types of cells, in the brain and heart, divide rarely or not at all. Cancer cells, however, do require well-
maintained telomeres if they are to keep lethally multiplying, which is why cancer is most commonly found in the oft-dividing cells of the gut, the reproductive system, the skin and the blood, cells that are actively producing telomerase. (It’s also why Mike West and others are pursuing anti-cancer drugs based on telomerase.)

De Grey, as is his wont, takes the strategy a few steps further, even if the end result bears little resemblance to medical reality as we know it. He has devised a plan to make people essentially immune to cancer. Stem cells from the cancer-prone organ systems would be removed and, in a process not yet developed, reproduced in the lab after they had been genetically modified to turn off their production of telomerase. The stem cells would then be reintroduced into the body, but not before they had been genetically modified a second time to make them more resistant to cancer-fighting chemotherapy drugs. So now people could be bombarded with ultrapowerful doses of chemo to kill any potential cancers, and their newly modified stem cells would shake off the insult. Over time, as people returned to the doctor for periodic stem cell “reseedings” (necessary because without telomerase, cells won’t divide normally), their cells would become progressively less capable of letting cancers grow.

Got that? Once upon a time, people speculated that the key to immortality was switching on telomerase, which is normally inactive in all somatic cells. Then it was pointed out that switching on telomerase is a common mutation in cancers, a prerequisite to indulging in wild, frantic reproduction unchecked (hmm, maybe there’s a reason telomerase genes are inactive in healthy cells). So de Grey proposes deleting telomerase genes altogether from somatic cells, which seems to me a counter-intuitive idea from a guy who wants to keep healthy cells reproducing forever, because cells would eventually lose telomeres and die, but he has a magic solution. We should 1) extract all the stem cells from cancer-prone tissues (basically, everything), a process we can’t do. Then we should 2) delete telomerase from all those cells, which is something we can sort of do, and then 3) load them up with shiny new genes that make them resistant to chemotherapy (it’s OK, these telomerase-deficient cells couldn’t possibly go cancerous, he thinks, while Ian Malcolm mutters “life finds a way” over in the corner), and 4) repopulate the patient’s organs with the stem cells (how? I don’t know), and 5) have the patients all come in periodically to repeat the process as their stem cells die off (dollar signs appear in the eyeballs of the venture capitalists).

This is ridiculous. Gene knock-outs are feasible and done fairly routinely on small sets of cells, but the rest is a pie-in-the-sky fantasy which almost certainly wouldn’t work, and which de Grey himself can’t do, and which isn’t being done by the institutes he is associated with, and which receive all that money from wealthy donors. It’s a spectacular con, pure high tech snake oil with an ever-shifting magic formula that he conjures up with the latest scientific buzzwords. He’s ready-made for TED talks.

Oh, yeah, he’s also a cryonics proponent.

I haven’t paid much attention to him, though, because he mainly seems to be bleeding rich vampires like Peter Thiel, who would be wasting their millions and billions anyway. He also has a seemingly harmless, idiosyncratic manner, again making him a perfect poster boy for TED talks, and who cares what those twits think? Except now he seems to have crossed the wrong entrepreneurs, who revealed some of the seediness of his personal attitudes, and he’s been put on indefinite leave for his behavior.

On Tuesday night, Laura Deming, the 27-year-old founder of the Longevity Fund, and Celine Halioua, the 26-year-old founder and CEO of Loyal, a biotech startup developing drugs to help dogs live longer, posted accounts on their blogs and to Twitter of experiences they had with de Grey as young scientists trying to gain a foothold in the field.

Ugh. Sorry, I already dislike these two for their petty silicon-valley-style startups and for being young and rich. I only say that to remove any idea that I’m prejudiced in their favor, because I’m not, but they didn’t deserve the treatment they got.

Here are the stories that are demolishing de Grey’s reputation.

Halioua, who had been an intern at SENS Research Foundation in 2016 and whose research as an undergraduate and graduate student had been funded by the organization, alleged that SENS executives exploited her youth and attractiveness to solicit funds from donors. Halioua described a dinner in which de Grey allegedly told her that she had a responsibility to have sex with the SENS donors in attendance so they would give money to the organization.

“I left that dinner sobbing,” she wrote. “It has taken me years to shake the deep-seated belief that I only got to where I am due to older men wanting to have sex with me.”

Do I believe her? I sure do. The entirety of de Grey’s career has been about milking money from donors, so the idea that he’d think pimping out his employees was a good plan fits my impression of his character. That is a deeply demeaning way to regard students.

Aubrey de Grey is 58. Leave the young women alone.

In her own post, Deming described an encounter she had a decade ago with de Grey, in which he told her over email that he had an “adventurous love life,” and expressed a suppressed desire to talk about it with her. Deming was 17 at the time, and had known de Grey since she was 14 and a precocious freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Deming said she dismissed the experience as a mistake on de Grey’s part. But in recent months, conversations with Halioua and others had convinced her the behavior was part of a serial pattern of predation on younger women. “I’m angry to realize that Aubrey inappropriately propositioned more than one woman over whom he was in a position of power, many in the community knew about it, and no one did anything,” she wrote.

Ick. Do not talk about your love life with 14-17 year old girls. Just don’t. Not ever.

But, the skeptical among you are saying, these are just two stories. De Grey denies them. Aren’t we just going on hearsay? I’d be more cautious about the allegations, but de Grey just had to open his big fat mouth and sound exactly like every other abuser.

Early Wednesday morning, de Grey addressed the allegations in a Facebook post. “Unsurprisingly, I deny these allegations,” he wrote. “What may be more surprising to you is this: my belief is that both Laura and Celine have been deceived into the view that I have done many things that I have in fact not done.”

In the post, De Grey said that the women’s descriptions of their personal experiences were “decidedly incomplete.” Deming “references an email I wrote — inadvisedly, for sure, and which I unreservedly regret — to her when she was 17, but she explicitly states that ‘I wrote it off as a mistake’ and that she only resurfaced it in the past few months at the instigation of others,” he wrote. “Celine references a dinner where she and I sat together, and accuses me of saying certain things that I utterly deny ever saying and that she implies I said when she was drunk. … It is instructive that the very next day she wrote to me without the faintest hint of ambivalence, asking for additional feedback on her presentation, and that every one of our exchanges, of which the most recent was less than a year ago, has been of similarly untarnished character.”

Oh god, what a crappy alibi. He’s accusing unnamed malignant individuals of brainwashing these women into saying things to do him harm. That sounds like projection to me. Of course he’s the center of the conspiracy against him, it’s not possible that these women could have independently decided to ruin him.

Then he dismisses his sexual email to an underage girl because she “wrote it off as a mistake”. Right. That’s what people do when they learn of things that make them uncomfortable, they try to rationalize it. This is mundane human behavior, it is not exculpatory at all — a 17 year old girl tried to make excuses for a man she admired doing a bad thing. It does not mean he didn’t do that bad thing. Calling Harvey Weinstein!

Most tone-deaf of all and so common there must be a psychological phenomenon named after it, he dismisses the other accusation because the woman was friendly afterwards. Sound familiar? Powerful influencer simply can’t believe that he could possibly have so much clout in his field that the people he oppresses might continue to ingratiate themselves with him. He can’t believe that the women he harasses would pull themselves together and try to cope with their harasser because he’s essential to their careers, therefore he thinks he must not have really harassed them.

Before, I would have said we should believe the women and investigate further, and in particular, we should see if there are other similar incidents in his history. After reading his rather arrogant reply, though, I’m just saying “fuck it, he’s guilty.” I don’t care what happens to another pseudo-scientific parasite and quack.

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Uh-oh. I just read some of the comments by his defenders on Facebook.

I’ve known Aubrey for over a decade now and during all those times that we met I’ve never seen him behave inappropriately, says a man named Sven. That’s convincing: so an old man who hits on young women has never, ever been improper in the presence of his bros? Calling Lawrence Krauss to the witness stand.

This is just a couple of SJW’s trying to cancel a mid-aged well educated well earning white male, says Rudy, who goes on to say Contemporary feminazi’s nowadays reduce any unsuccessful approach attempt or even a simple compliment, simply if unwanted, to sexual harrassment, or at least sexism. Wokistry judges quickly, on the spot, without process,goes public in stead of to court, and makes intention processes. I guess I’ll have to judge de Grey by the company he keeps, as well.

Says Stefano, How comes 17 years old are not entitled to be solicited, but should instead be discriminated as a matter of principle?! This sounds pretty ageist to my ears. By the way, age of consent is civilised countries is 14. I could almost hear the phrase It’s not pedophilia, it’s ephebophilia! quivering on his lips.

Looks like a witch hunt to me, says Kurt. Yeah, “witch hunt” gets thrown around a lot over there.

I once groped a girl in a nightclub without permission around 45 years ago, says Dirk. Two wrongs do make a right!

Does it really matter what one said or wrote many years ago? complains Valerija, one of the few women defending him. This was ten years ago, not that long, when the girl was 17 and de Grey was 48. I guess the rule is you can pursue under-age girls until you are 50, then you have to slow down.

This is a more typical response from one of the few women commenting:

I have never in my life read more automatic misogynistic responses to a post. You all are upchucking a huge, untapped (until now) volcano of hatred towards women in the worlds of science and finance. It doesn’t even matter now whether the women are telling the truth or not. The tone of the original post and the comments are revealing enough. I know this is not the popular response but that has not stopped me from being the voice of truth ever, so here I am. Pile it on, men (and a few women). That’s what you do best. #deplorable

The general consensus is that how dare these women hinder Aubrey de Grey’s progress towards eliminating aging. One problem with that perspective is that no, Aubrey de Grey has never and will never make a significant contribution in gerontology. He’s a hype train that has finally been derailed.

Do I need to state the obvious again? Biologists keep telling everyone that sex and gender are a lot more complex and diverse than the binary bill of goods the ideologues try to sell you. Now let’s add another scientific discipline shouting the truth at the public, with Archaeologists for Trans Liberation.

Human biology extends beyond and between “Male” and “Female”

The erasure of the complexity of sex and gender beyond simple binaries is a function of contemporary transphobic ideologies within archaeological analyses and not a reflection of past peoples’ lives. Moreover, this erasure risks providing fodder for accounts of the past that are used to further marginalize trans and gender fluid people.

Identifying and understanding past people’s conceptions and experiences of gender is not straightforward. The further back one goes, the fewer and more fragmented the traces of people’s lives become and the more complicated it is to interpret and understand them. We work from scraps to construct narratives that are messy, ragged and rarely twine together.

It’s a very thorough article, and well referenced. I especially appreciate the bits we mere biologists don’t know as much about.

Our current social organization, based around strict lines delineating gender, primary sex characteristics, and sexuality, is a relatively recent phenomenon. It emerged as part of European hegemonic colonialism and serves to enforce and maintain capitalist norms in the home and wider society (Monaghan 2015). An imposed and rigid gender binary regulates reproduction (a concern of nationalist states), breaks down Indigenous and non-European kin connections and families (perpetuating genocide), and positions the household as a site of capitalist surplus accumulation (through regulated social roles and relations of (re)production) (Morgensen 2010, 2012).

Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies critics such as Deborah Miranda (2010) and Scott Lauria Morgensen (2011) have documented the ways in which colonial governments engaged in violent projects of gender normalization targeting Indigenous individuals and communities. Daniel Justice (2010) draws on archaeological materials as resources for inspiring queer Cherokee worldviews, politics, and modes of belonging. Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate scholar Kim TallBear, in her academic writing (2018) and public scholarship (Wilber, Small-Rodriguez and Keene 2019), explores the way binary structures colonised bodies and beds, breaking and distorting traditional kin relations.

Such practices seem to have been a regular or even necessary force in sustaining European colonial violence across the globe. Religious strictures against ‘sodomy’ (which often glossed a range of non-heteronormative sex practices) were frequently used by European colonial and religious authorities to punish gender nonconforming individuals in Africa and South America. Epprecht notes that the British South African Company was particularly enthusiastic in prosecuting “homosexual crimes” during its first year of occupation of Zimbabwe, suggesting the commonplace nature of non-heteronormative relationships prior to Colonization, and “[indicating] a reflexive defense of patriarchal, heterosexual masculinity by the homophobic representatives of the colonial state” (Epprecht 1998: 217). British colonial sodomy laws, despite no longer being in place in the U.K., remain on the books in many colonised countries, and continue to drive state violence and acts of bigotry against queer and gender diverse people (Sanders 2009; Semugoma 2012).

That does explain why so many of the status quo warriors are vehement in their denial of the science.

According to Lifesite News (as we all know, a highly reliable site), Outer space to be solely the dominion of gays and trans. Now it sounds spectacularly fun, but I guess I’m excluded, not being either. They really are discriminating against us cis-het folk! I’m also curious about the sexual orientation of Branson and Bezos.

The story goes on:

According to a growing number of astronomers, physicists, and major scientific journals, anyone who is not sufficiently pro-LGBTQ+ should be denied a presence in the cosmos. 

There is a movement afoot within NASA to rename the much anticipated, $8.8 billion yet-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Why? As a State Department official in the 1950s, James Webb opposed employing gays and lesbians, viewing them as security risks susceptible to blackmail.     

Webb went on to become in 1961 the head of NASA, where he oversaw the Apollo program.   

Because the race to beat the USSR to the moon was viewed as integral to winning the Cold War, the Apollo program had to be protected against vulnerabilities to Soviet interference.  Webb was responsible for implementing federal policy that included purging gays and lesbians from the NASA workforce.    

That’s rather thin gruel of evidence for the extraordinary claim that all the straight people will be denied a presence in the cosmos. It’s a bit of a grand leap from suggesting that large space projects shouldn’t be named after bigots to whining that the straights have been banned from outer space.

You do know that the reason gay people were considered vulnerable to Soviet interference is because good ol’ American bigots would use information about people’s sexuality to find common cause with the nefarious Russkies and wreck our own programs, right? All they had to do was recognize that gay people could also be patriotic Americans to negate the threat, but Webb willingly went along with a plan to discriminate against gay folk, which suggests he shared that bigotry. It’s the presence of homophobes, like everyone at Lifesite news, that is the problem.

They also make the claim that LGBT corruption: Making the hard sciences soft, squishy, citing the fact (which is a fact) that statements about, for instance, the biology of men and women are more complicated to interpret than a simplistic, dishonest TERF can comprehend.

Scientific American regularly publishes articles that are political, not scientific, where LGBT ideology trumps intellectual curiosity, intellectual honesty, and solid research. Recent editorial headlines include Why Anti-Trans Laws Are Anti-Science, A Nationwide Ban Is Needed for “Anti-Gay Therapy,” and Gender-Affirming Health Care Should Be a Right, Not a Crime — all of which belong in the opinion sections of The Advocate or LGBTQ Nation, not a science journal. 

Nature has appended notices to articles and social media postings, declaring, “Nature recognizes that sex and gender are neither binary nor fixed,” or some variation on that theme.  

Science and policy are intertwined, so of course a science journal is going to take a stand on the intersection of science with politics. It is true that “intellectual curiosity, intellectual honesty, and solid research” support the idea that anti-trans laws are anti-science, because they are, and that “anti-gay therapy” doesn’t work and does more harm than good, and fucking of course gender-affirming health care should be provided to everyone who needs it. What is wrong with these people that think respecting the diversity of human identities should be a crime? It is anti-science to think it’s bad that scientific evidence repudiates their narrow-minded views.

As for Nature…it is entirely reasonable that they would qualify statements about the nature of men’s and women’s sexual and gender nature with a reminder that those properties are more fluid and complex. They are rightly concerned that, for instance, actuarial statistics that classify people into male and female categories will be misinterpreted as evidence that sex is rigidly binary by, for instance, bigoted readers like Lifesite News.

Case in point: they try to discredit the petition to change the name of the James Webb Space Telescope by implying that the people behind it are a bunch of weirdos.

The name-change petition was launched by the four astronomers, including one who identifies as ‘non-binary,’ an astrophysicist who uses the pronouns ‘she/they,’ and a professor of physics and astronomy who is also a core faculty member in women’s and gender studies who identifies as “queer and agender.”  The petition now has amassed 1,250 signatories, according to Nature.  

But that makes the point for those scientists! These non-binary astronomers exist, and are speaking out and demanding respect as human beings; they are saying that you don’t get to pretend they can only be pure, ideologically conservative men and pure, ideologically conservative women. They are different, and don’t fit into the traditional pair of bins, and they are protesting the fact that people like them were discriminated against! Meanwhile, Lifesite News is not contesting the fact of discrimination, implicitly acknowledging that Webb was biased against them, instead just trying to justify it because we were in a space race against the Soviet Union.

It was a stupid race, anyway. Think what we could have accomplished with less competition and more cooperation, and with the assistance of more brilliant minds that just happened to have sexual preferences James Webb, and other hidebound administrators, didn’t like.